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Former Badgers player Sean Lewis is enjoying life as Kent State's head football coach

MADISON – Sean Lewis wasn’t sure what to think when he received a phone call from Kent State athletic director Joel Nielsen.

“It caught me off-guard,” Lewis, in his second season as Kent State’s head coach, said. “I was like, ‘You sure you have the right number? We’re a four-win football team here.’ ”

The call came shortly after the end of the 2017 regular season. Nielsen had fired head coach Paul Haynes, who had compiled a 14-45 record in five seasons.

Lewis, who played quarterback and tight end at Wisconsin from 2004-07, had just finished his second season as the co-offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach at Syracuse under head coach under Dino Babers. Lewis had worked under Babers for two seasons at Eastern Illinois (2012 and ’13) and two more at Bowling Green (2014 and ’15) before moving to Syracuse.

Nielsen was aware Syracuse finished just 4-8 in each of Lewis’ first two seasons on the staff but he had been impressed by the Bowling Green offense in 2014 and ’15. Lewis was the Bowling Green wide receivers coach in 2014 and the co-offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach in ’15.

“He had seen firsthand what we were capable of,” Lewis said.

Lewis was named head coach at Kent State on Dec. 21, 2017. He was 31, the youngest FBS head coach ever. He brings his second Kent State team to Camp Randall Stadium to face No. 9 UW (4-0) at 11 a.m. Saturday. The Golden Flashes, who finished 1-7 in the Mid-American Conference and 2-10 overall last season, are 1-0 in the MAC and 2-2 overall.

Lewis played at Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Illinois, and began his coaching career there in 2007 as the team’s offensive coordinator.

Before he graduated from UW in the spring of 2007, Lewis talked to then-offensive coordinator Paul Chryst about making coaching his career choice.

“Coach Chryst was one of the first people that I talked to about jumping into this coaching profession," Lewis, now 33, recalled. “He kind of laughed and said: ‘Man, I thought you were smarter than that and you’d find a different way to make a living.’

“Once we got to talking, he said to just make sure that wherever you’re at that your head, your heart and your butt are all in the same spot.”

Translation: Make sure you are happy where you are and focus on that job, not your next job.

“You have your goals and aspirations and you throw them up on your board and you see them and they motivate you,” Lewis said. “But if you do a good job day in and day out and you just stack those days, I was always a believer that someone would notice.”

Lewis coached at Richards High School for three seasons. He coached tight ends at Division II Nebraska-Omaha in 2010, served as a graduate assistant at Akron in 2011 and then was hired by Babers to coach inside wide receivers and tight ends at Eastern Illinois, an FCS school.

Eastern Illinois went 19-7 in Lewis’ two seasons there. Bowling Green went 18-9 in his two seasons there. Syracuse finished below .500 in Lewis’ two seasons there as Babers worked to rebuild the program. The breakthrough came last season, when Syracuse finished 10-3.

“He worked to get different opportunities,” Chryst said of Lewis, “and obviously did well with those.”

Chryst encouraged Lewis to pursue a career in coaching, if that is what he wanted, but also cautioned the lifestyle can be difficult.

“It’s going to be tough,” Chryst said. “But I think if you go in it for the right reasons, then you’ll do well in it.

“You want him to have open eyes. But he is smart. He is smarter than I am.”

Lewis’ No. 1 task at Kent State was to establish a winning culture.

“You need to learn how to win by expecting to win and having a standard by which you go about your work,” Lewis said. “A lot of what we’ve been harping on this past off-season has been ingraining those alpha habits, those championship habits. Because the last thing that is going to come is the recognition on the field. Everyone sees that.

“But you don’t just wake up one day and say, 'We’re champions.' You have to work toward that. You have to change the cultural expectations, change the standards, change the way the kids are doing things.”

Now four games into his second season as a head coach, Lewis still marvels at the speed with which the opportunity came.

“You just put your blinders on and you go to work,” Lewis said. “Where this great game has taken me is unbelievable.

“Was it faster than I expected? Hell yeah.”

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